Good answer. I would have suggested the same, if I had known about it. :-) ... Looking at the tree view of htop, it seems that this somehow removes the terminal from the parent node, and "promotes" the program to the parent's level. With gedit, its parent became "init", the top (or root) level of the tree. Thanks, it's nice to know this trick; I always used alt-F2 to run programs instead, but this might be more convenient.
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Marty FriedJul 14 '12 at 19:45